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by prawnsalad 2523 days ago
CSS sprites most likely. You can combine related smaller images into one image and then position the background image to an element so that only one portion of it is shown. This increases load speed and caching abilities since only one http request is made for the single combined background image.
1 comments
notatoad 2523 days ago
the hn vote arrow is not a sprite - it's a single image, displayed rotated 180 degrees for the downvote.

https://news.ycombinator.com/grayarrow.gif

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catmanjan 2523 days ago
Huh, I always thought it was an alt code character...
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notatoad 2522 days ago
it could be. i don't know why they use a gif instead. i usually keep HN at 125% zoom and the vote arrows look really terrible.
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